Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Another Avaya IP Office problem

Our Avaya IP Office 500 system went down again. A slightly different error for inside callers and of course clients trying to call us got an error message. It’s been only 14 days since our last reboot, I have to say that our system is never going to pass any acceptance criteria if it can barely stay up for 2 weeks. And of course, after the system reboots the software is not reloaded into the phones leading to a public safety issue and significant loss of functionality.

T1 connectivity is hardly “revolutionary” or “advanced” technology as you’ve claimed. T1s have been around since 1960 and interfacing to T1 circuits is basic phone system functionality.

The three alternatives that have been presented are unacceptable:1) Go to a private build that is several releases old; there have been significant security, functionality and reliability enhancements since the old release; retrograding to an old, “private” release seems like a risky solution, especially as there is no guarantee for support in future builds locking us into an obsolete version of the phone system2) Upgrade to the latest release, although ABCNA has reported that this release does not fix the problems3) Live with a phone system that is unreliable; phone system reliability should be measured in years—random crashes every 2 weeks are not acceptable

I have to say that I’m shocked that Avaya and ABCNA feels that this situation is acceptable. As a “leading Avaya dealer” in the Northeast, ABCNA should have enough influence with Avaya to get this problem fixed in a current version of the operating system.